I am very happy to begin these book discussions again. Thanks to those who suggested it. I will put the post up until the agreed time that discussion ends, then lock it and start a new one.To give everyone a chance to read/reread the book, posts can begin on Saturday,20th October.
Here goes then with the first book for discussion:
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451

Post deleted by ren33

Sorry, I did ask that people should not post in this thread until 20th Oct , so all have a chance to read the book (see my post above.) Could I ask you to put your comments in the other thread? Thanks(Veronika I have not deleted your post, I just moved it to the correct thread)

Right , Literary Ladies and Gents, it is all yours. I hope you all enjoyed this month's choice.
Personally I found it easy to read and enjoyed it.
Over to you.

Ok. I also found it easy to read, and it didn't drag on at all. I found it very thought provoking, and I like that.

I just loved the time that Bradbury spent explaining not just details, but the character's thoughts. It annoys me when authors don't cover details or how the character was feeling at the time of something happening.

The foreword at the start of the book was interesting as well.

I enjoyed reading the book and found it easy to enjoy as well. I have to say it's amazing just how much Ray Brabury forsaw 54 years ago, and how close we have in fact come to that society today. This is truly a thought provoking novel that amazingly, has faced becoming a challenged and banned book. But this is not just any normal book, I don't think anyway, I think it's far more than that, and I think it's important people read it so they can realize just how far we've gone in that direction without realizing it.

Certain high schools don't teach the book, don't even carry it, some libraries don't have it, they've passed around censored copies of it, and even as recent in the news records as last year, parents have been fighting to have it taken out of high schools saying it shouldn't be there because it offends and upsets people. These afore mentioned people are their kids, and just what, I ask, are these parents teaching their kids by trying to ban a book simply because it doesn't agree with them? We're not even talking about if it were Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, or A Clockwork Orange, or American Psycho...though let's be honest, these are teenagers in high school, and in this day and age, I trust they could handle this book, those and any other the school might throw at them.

Of course, I say handle in the term of dealing with its contents...reading and comprehending the exact story would be another thing. I don't know the exact number of illiterates, but it seems every year despite the efforts, it's a growing problem that continues...this person says half the country can't read past an 8th grade level, another person says that one third of high school graduates can't even read their diplomas.

But this just further reminds me of Fahrenheit 451 because if I recall correctly, both Captain Beatty and Faber more or less told Montag that the society quit reading on its on accord. And it makes sense if there's a growing number of people who CAN'T read, they won't want to and they simply don't read.

Of course then you about have to wonder, these sorts of people, where are they? One of the first things that seems to come to mind for an answer is in sports in high school and college...this discussion for Fahrenheit 451 could not have come around at a better time because just last night in my town's newspaper, a former teacher said we have a crisis in that we support and cheer these young people in colleges and learning institutions, and reveal they can't complete a single sentence but the majority of society doesn't care so long as they do well in sports. I can't remember the exact words but he said something along "that's it, keep up your speed, hit the ball harder, don't bother reading, grow up dumb"...and with so many people going to college on sports scholarships, it would see that IS among the way they get through school, not so much by their intelligence as simply by being good in sports.

Sports were a favorite in the society of Fahrenheit 451, as Captain Beatty said on page 52, "More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don't have to think, eh? Organize and organize and super organize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. more pictures. The mind drinks less and less."

Then on page 53 Beatty adds, "With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers and swimmings instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word 'intellectual,' of course became the swear word it deserved to be. You always dread the unfamiliar."

I don't know about others but this very well describes sports in my town. Sports are THE most concerned part of school, not the academics, not the fact that we have 6th graders who teachers stick on 2nd grave reading levels, just so long as the sports are good, everybody is happy. The schools have games on Friday nights AND Saturday afternoons, not just one or the other anymore...more sports for everybody...in fact I'm looking for the day they include football games at school on Sundays as well, more and more and more sports for everybody, less thinking, less home environment.

Speaking of home environment, on page 55 you'll recall Beatty saying, "The home environment can undo a lot you try to do at school. That's why we've lowered the kindergarten age year after year until now we're almost snatching them from the cradle."

I wasn't alive in 1953 when this book was written, but my mother was and she said that kindergarten was optional in her time and before, so some kids started school at the first grade at age 6, and that would be their first time at a school. And today, today we have daycare centers which take children as young as 6 months old, and they stay there until they're 3-4 and time for preschool, then kindergarten at 5-6 depending on the child's birthday.

They are in fact snatching them out of the cradle if you think about it...oh sure, nobody declared daycare mandatory, but there are a lot of parents who don't see as they have the time (or in some lousy instances) the want, to have their children at home with them all day, so these children are practically raised by the people running the care centers instead of their parents. The teachers tell them different things than their parents do, and there's a conflict, but spending more time at daycare, the children sometimes stay on the teacher's side instead of their own parent.

I realize I've made a long drawn out mess of my opinion on this, but this book said a lot to me, far more than just an author's view on what is or what may be...it is in fact what we are becoming.

I'll have more to say later, probably, meanwhile let's see what some others have to say about the book.

My first comment has to concern the quality of the writing. When I first read the book many years ago, I wasn't equipped to appreciate the prose, and in subsequent years, I always thought of Bradbury as a Sci-Fi writer -- that's a genre I rarely read. I had liked the film, but as Bradbury himself has said, it played with the story in some unfortunate ways.

Returning to "Fahrenheit 451," I was surprised by its poetry, by the sensitivity with which Bradbury limns Montag's thoughts and experiences, in particular, as his certainties are crumbling. The first conversation with Clarisse is especially effective and very eerie, since it's used to explain the manner in which the world has changed. For me, because of my profession, Clarisse's comments about museums gave me both a laugh and a chill:

"And at the museums, have you EVER been? ALL abstract. That's all there is now. My uncle says it was different once. A long time back sometimes pictures said things or even showed PEOPLE."

Just a few short lines, but nothing could have given me a better sense of the world of the novel.

But to pick up on Cadet's remarks, the book has generally been viewed as a comment on censorship. However, I bought the 50th anniversary edition to replace my old one, and in the back, there is an interview with Bradbury in which he emphasizes that his concern was with the potentially negative effects of television: "I was considering the whole social atmosphere: the impact of TV and radio and the lack of education. I could see the coming event of schoolteachers not teaching reading anymore. The less they taught, the more you wouldn't need books."

While "Fahrenheit 451" is remarkably prescient in some ways, I'm not prepared to say that we've actually reached or are even nearing its anti-literary, anti-intellectual dystopianism. The very existence and rapid growth of the Internet proves that while people may often be reading bad information, they still WANT information. They feel a need for it, even if it doesn't come in the form of a volume one can hold in one's hands. In fact, I have to suggest that Montag and certain other characters are drawn in such a way as to imply that this need for knowledge, this curiosity, is innate, strong enough to cause some people to risk their lives to seek out and preserve books. In fact, in the midst of this appalling universe, Bradbury remains still optimistic, using the famous words from "Ecclesiastes" to emphasize the point. (The destruction wrought by the war, by the way, is a somewhat facile device, since it implies that the world can and will somehow be rebuilt by the literature-minded outcasts and the knowledge they carry in their heads. I couldn't help but think about Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" at this point and the likely condition of the world after a war of this magnitude. But even McCarthy allows us hope in the end.)

In other words, optimism, too, may be a standard trait of most human beings.

I've written enough for the moment. I look forward to other comments.

Well I'll admit we're not quite as far as their society but there are a lot of factors and elements that run similarities between ours and it. A lot of things, Clarisse said that she was scared of people her own age, teenagers, because they killed each other...this was almost non-existent in the 1950s, but today it's on the news every other day.

Clarisse also mentions people don't "talk" about anything, just list a bunch of popular things and say how swell...it's difficult to talk to some teenagers because they're exactly like it...I've had the privilege of meeting a few who thought more like Clarisse, but I've also seen a fair share of the materialistic sorts who couldn't concentrate on a genuine current event to save their lives.

On page 28 she said "But do you know, we never ask questions, or at least most don't; they just run the answers at you, bing, bing, bing," referring to how it works in school...and I've spoken with a lot of students and former students who said they were punished just for asking questions in class. And where questions are concerned, Captain Beatty comments on page 55 about Clarisse, "She didn't want to know HOW a thing was done, but WHY. That can be embarrassing. You ask Why to a lot of things and you wind up unhappy indeed, if you keep at it".

This isn't wrong, at least not in some instances...I take it upon myself to ask why to a lot of things, and seldom do I get any real opinions or ideas...for the most of it I'm told to shut up because I don't talk about anything they want to hear, and what they want to hear...well if I may be blunt, you don't need an IQ above that of a talking monkey to be interested in the things they WANT to hear instead of what's asked. They don't consider, they don't think, they're immediately upset by the questions of Why, and attack the person who asks.

This takes me back to Mildred though, after Montag told her about the book lady and the fire. Mildred, not even knowing this woman, never having met her, already decided she hated her, simply because she got Montag upset and he talked to Mildred and made her upset as well...all without either of them really ever knowing her. In truth, say something today in a crowd of people that doesn't agree with their quick fix answers and opinions, and you're bound to be hated too, without ever being known personally.

Something else I keep thinking back to, Captain Beatty on page 51 says "School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored". In some instances, school is shortened because they are taking more and more days off for teacher's meetings.

Discipline relaxed, that's an understatement of the century, there's little discipline in the homes anymore and certainly none in school. History dropped, when I was in the 6th grade, my history book had 10 pages on Hitler and the Holocaust and World War II, by the time I was in 9th grade it was all fit onto one page, then by the time I took history in 12th grade and in college, it was nowhere to be found in the book. English and spelling gradually neglected...these days we have high school and college students writing text message slang into their reports and essays. And a lot of people (though thankfully majority disagrees with them) are more lenient and say that it doesn't matter how they write. But let's be honest, can we honestly say that the thought of schools okaying "b4 Bob Ewell was killed" (and that IS a genuine excerpt from an assignment) in a book report isn't scary?

Then on page 52, Beatty says "Don't step on the toes of the dog-lovers, the cat-lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico." Today, everybody is worried about offending somebody else so they're politically correcting books, TV shows, movies, etc...and political correctiveness...some people are so proud to be PC, but do these people realize it was started by Stalin? I don't know about anybody else but I would not want to be supporting anything he started.

Page 54, "Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book about tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book." We're not burning them but they are becoming banned and challenged...in fact I spoke with somebody who said their favorite book as a child is one that's not around much anymore because it was banned, Little Black Sambo.

Then on page 56 Beatty concludes, "So bring on your clubs and parties, your acrobats and magicians, your daredevils, jet cars, motorcycle helicopters, your sex and heroin, more of everything to do with automatic reflex." This strikes me as the perfect recipe for instant gratification, something this generation knows all too much about.

It's really odd if you think about it, everybody wants this or that or the other, they want it now, they get it now but it's still not fast enough. Young people today? Some of them are so indulged in the instant part of instant graitifcation, if the climax of the film isn't in the opening credits, they write it off as boring and leave the room, this I also know from experience.

Beatty also mentions speeding up the picture, "Click, pic, look, eye, now, flick, here, there, swift, pace, up, down, in, out, why, how, who, what, where, eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, bing, bong, boom!" A lot of the films of today are done just like that, everything comes at you so fast you can't make heads or tails of what's going on, yet everybody's happy with it and wants more, they couldn't care less about slowing the picture down to actually figure out what's going on.

Of course, in this generation there's a name for these people, an official label problem for people who can't pay attention for more than 2 minutes, ADHD. A genuine problem blown out of proprtion so everybody has it and everybody must be on the medication for it...and studies say that in some instances, kids get ADHD from watching too much fast moving TV and film when they're 2 and 3, at the critical point of their lives when they pick up on everything. They respond to the fast moving pictures then don't bother waiting around for something of a literal speed.

I mentioned medication with this, pills, we must have some 500 million pills in the world today and everybody's on something...and every day they put more ads out about things that you NEED pills for. It seems they won't be happy until all the world is doped to the gills. Let us not forget, in Fahrenheit 451, Mildred was one of many people who took pills every single day, sometimes in large doses, to keep happy but to also keep from feeling or thinking anything. This does not strike me as far fetched from how it is today.

Another thing I consider, Fahrenheit 451's technology...those seashell things Mildred listens to...today they could very well be compared to iPods, and their parlor walls? Every day we hear about bigger and bigger flat screen TVs that simply must be had by everybody to get the best picture and best quality.

Now here's where we take a far fetched turn, but remember what Clarisse said about going to fun parks to break windows and smash cars? Back then video games didn't exist, but had they, I'm not too sure Ray Bradbury wouldn't have written about violent ones which could be compared to today's ones. We must have a million or 100 million video games in the world today, but about 90% of all the ones we see advertised are all about destruction, race and crash cars, rob and kill people, earn more points the worse ways you kill them, get more points if you kill hookers after sleeping with them. We have games out about shooting soldiers, shooting zombies, shooting aliens, even about shooting policemen...if this isn't an inclination that we are becoming a desensitized bunch who feed on violence, what does it say about us?

Clarisse also mentions nobody believes in responsibility, but her grandfather remembered when kids didn't kill each other, and people were responsible. What have we today? Disciplining your kids so they actually learn is pretty much outlawed. Who's responsible anymore? If anybody does or does not do something it's because they have a disorder or a disease or they can't help themselves or because they had a bad life or bad parents or something or other...we're losing responsibility as individuals and as a society.

Something else that really got me last night when I was going over the book. Beatty says make man forget there is such a thing as war, they were entering a war and nobody cared, they were more obsessed with the TV shows or how people looked. And just a few nights ago Glenn Beck on CNN was talking about how more people paid attention to Ellen DeGeneres' dog than President Bush talking about how we're to avoid World War III.

There are some times when a book is not just a book, and I truly believe that can be said for Fahrenheit 451. What's everybody else think?

Frankly, I was unaware of this book before Michael Moore appropriated the rights to its title, and being no fan of his I did not feel inclined to investigate an old man's science fiction book of half a century ago. My loss! Fortunately, I was invited to read it for this forum, and discovered unexpected power and truth.

The cover of the paperbook edition I borrowed from the library calls it "the classic bestseller about censorship," but Bradbury himself says that's a misinterpretation. He intended it as an attack on the "Great Wasteland" wreaked by unbridled TV-watching.

Does television kill books? It depends who's watching. Some watchers are sparked to run to the library and learn more; others find their tiny intellectual appetites sated. What we as parents and educators must do is fan the flames of our children's innate curiosity, being careful our own spark isn't extinguished by the smothering dailiness of habit and duty.

This is the essential, the civilizing fire Montag finds after his river escape.

"He stopped, afraid he might blow the fire out with a single breath.....a strange fire because it meant a different thing to him. It was not burning. It was warming."

I dissolved into tears when Granger welcomed Montag from the dead and introduced him to the elite intellectuals as the Book of Ecclesiastes, and then called them Swift, Darwin, Schweitzer, and so on. We become what we eat.

"It's a very odd thing
As odd as can be
That whatever Miss T. eats
Turns into Miss T."
Walter John de la Mare

Yet Bradbury isn't talking about rote memorization or the cramming of facts into heads, but emphasizes savoring, digesting, becoming. No matter that when the work is internalized it is also personalized. That, in fact, is what makes it immortal.

Books are indeed personalized when read, which is what frightens some people about them. At a minimum, they force readers to engage in a modicum of thought, which can be life-altering even in small doses, and one of the themes of "Fahrenheit 451" is that thought is to be feared. It's confusing and threatening, it is even depressing, a point that Bradbury makes when Montag reads Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" to his wife and her two friends, and Mrs. Phelps begins sobbing uncontrollably.

Beatty (one of the genius creations of the novel) insists that people do not want to think, they do not want to be confused, they prefer to avoid controversy. Books do not agree with one another, they offend this group or that, they merely encourage cognitive dissonance with which human beings cannot cope But in the world of "Fahrenheit 451," the absence of thought is also murderous. Mildred Montag, an empty vessel if ever there was one, is not a happy, content, or complete woman. Without thought, she not only lacks three-dimensionality, she has no reason to exist, so that her mindless, benumbed consumption of a sleeping-pill overdose -- and the casual manner in which the emergency technicians deal with it -- is initially bizarre but ultimately not particularly distressing. By the same token, the annihilating war isn't genocidal, it is merely wiping out people who, for the most part, are already dead. Tant pis, shrugs the reader, and I suspect that Bradbury intended that reaction. Beatty, on the other hand, is vastly and ironically well-read. His very hypnotic effectiveness is a testament to the stunning effectiveness of books.

The book may not have begun as a fictional treatise on censorship, but Bradbury did discuss the issue in a coda he wrote after learning that a publisher had removed the "hells" and "damns" from school editions. Obviously, censorship is a topic raised by the novel, and Beatty's discussion of the problems created by books does resonate in our own day. Aside from the way this or that book may offend an interest group, I think the problem of confusion is a significant one.

The writer Mary Gordon once commented that one significant difference between good literature and bad is that the former doesn't always meet your expectations: the guy doesn't always get the girl, good doesn't always triumph over evil, life may go on as usual, and that life may not be uplifting and inspiring. Book banning tends to involve not only "offensive" books," but also those that force us to confront the gray areas of life, and gray areas are scary. Better not to face them.

So, perhaps we can consider the question of how book-banning 50 years after Bradbury wrote his novel still involves social fears and confusions. Any comments?

"So, perhaps we can consider the question of how book-banning 50 years after Bradbury wrote his novel still involves social fears and confusions. Any comments?"

I have a comment as to why it is...communism. But then again that's my answer for a lot of things being the way they are. But maybe it's not that big a stretch...after all, isn't propaganda and brainwashing among all that stuff within communism? After all, first start with censoring books, taking out parts you don't like...people don't get the whole story and they may see something as a complete 180 of what it's supposed to be. Without that missing part, you'll never know.

Then censoring comes to be not enough, they have to be about rewritten entirely...take for example the way they now proudly distribute Politically Correct fairy tales...Larry the Cable Guy had the right idea on that one...and if the books aren't rewritten, they become challenged, or banned. In fact there's a whole book out from 1978 with all the books that up to that point were banned, from the early philosophy, to Alice in Wonderland, to Dr. Doolittle, to Tom Sawyer, to Fahrenheit 451, etc.

Ban the books, the people don't read them, they don't know all this stuff, they don't think about it...so it's that much less they think about and for some people that much less they use their minds at all. And that seems to be how people want this generation and the next raised, to NOT ask questions, to NOT think, so they can just be a bunch of sheep being led around by some higher authority of power or something of the sort.

Everyone here has said everything I was trying to say, and made senso of it. Especially Cadet.

I think all the points brought up in the book just highlight just how close our society is to becoming like something "out of a book" namely this book.

I know many teenagers who hate reading, because it is "boring"
They prefer to go to parties and get smashed rather than be intellectually stimulated by reading things. Even reading genres like fantasy, which has little base in truth, opens the mind to creativity, and makes the reader believe that they are in that world. The reader literally experiences what the author has written in the book, they believe that they are there.

The censoring bit is true as well. Very true. If a few people are offended, then suddenly the thing that offends them becomes banned. What about the days where seeing a women not fully covered offended a certain belief. Would they have banned women???

There will reach a point where they can't ban any more though, and if they did reach that point, it would be a very sad world indeed...

Since this is a book discussion group, I think it might be helpful to try and discuss "Fahrenheit 451" as a work of literature first and foremost. Perhaps we could see more comments here on its text and prose, its characterizations, along with the remarks about its relevance to contemporary social concerns.

For example, would anyone care to take a stab at a comparison between "Fahrenheit 451" and "1984" or "Brave New World"?

I haven't read 1984, I did read Brave New World, couldn't understand half of it...but what I could gather in comparison was that everybody must all be alike, and everybody took this pill or that one so they would remain alike, think the same things, etc. In Fahrenheit 451 Beatty mentions 3D sex magazines, in Brave New World there are the feelies which I guess would be like a 3D skin flick or something of the sort. It's been a while since I read it so I can't recall any other comparisons other than the fact that nobody really read anymore, for if I recall similar reasons to Fahrenheit.

Yes, I couldn't help but compare Beatty to O'Brien in "1984." Was he a good guy or a bad guy? More on that when I tackle the religious angle. And both Orwell and Bradbury have set an Everyman at odds with the oppression of an impersonal, totalitarian government and under the supervision of an untrustworthy authority figure. (No chatting up the governor at a hockey game, eh, Frankie?) And then there’s the rewriting of the history of the fire department, a job straight from the Ministry of Truth.

I was pleased to find the book to be more of the post-apocalyptic genre than the technological science fiction and similar both to Pat Franks' "Alas, Babylon" and Stephen Vincent Benet's short story, "By the Waters of Babylon" in stressing the importance of the preservation of knowledge in order to rebuild a saner civilization. This leaves the reader with the hope of a better tomorrow.

Bradbury immediately focuses on the depravity and destructiveness of the present culture: "It was a pleasure to burn." He then leads us through Montag's doubts and isolation to his thirst for knowledge. Chaim Potok wrote a book called "The Chosen" in which a young Hasidic boy is guided to great literature by a sympathetic Orthodox Jew. That literature was forbidden to Danny but vital; reading it was worth risking his father's wrath. So Montag must read, even at the risk of losing his career, his home, his life. Mildred insists, "Books aren't people...My 'family' is people." For Danny and Montag books ARE alive! Mildred and her friends prefer bread and circuses.

The comment on abstract art sent me scurrying to Francis Schaeffer’s “How Should We then Live?” He postulates exactly the same thesis, that modern (mid-20th century) art is a sign of a sick society. “The fragmentation shown in post-Impressionist paintings was parallel to the loss of a hope for a unity of knowledge in philosophy.” And he quotes David Douglas Duncan regarding a set of Picasso’s pictures: “Of course, not one of these pictures was actually a portrait but his prophecy of a ruined world.”

Is Clarisse a romantic attraction? No. She represents what is pure and innocent and good. Yet she stands in contrast to Mildred, the detached wife with whom intimacy and fulfillment are impossible. The parallel to Winston Smith's wife is clear. Bradbury's own short story, "The Pedestrian," foreshadowed Clarisse with a male character whose crime against the state was enjoying the outdoors and reality, or should I say, "realness." Shades of Emily in "Our Town"! "Oh, Mama, just look a me one minute as though you really saw me.....Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?"

How, then, SHOULD we live? Beyond Bradbury’s obvious intent to get us to turn off the TV and stick our noses into books, we should celebrate knowledge above entertainment. As scrolls gave way to books, books may well be superseded by electronic gadgets. The important thing isn’t the binding or lack thereof but the content, the engaging of the intellect, the gaining of knowledge, and the provoking to thoughtful action. Education can be defined as the heritage of knowledge passed from one generation to another. Reading plays a great part in that education. And just as in the mystery and miracle of one generation’s physical reproduction of another, so in the joining of an author’s ideas with my own, we run the risk of producing a freak. But we must run that risk or face extinction.

Oh, one more comment.

Bradbury was unhappy to find his book had been "censored." I call that kind of censoring "bowdlerizing," and appropriate in order to make the work available to students. In "Fahrenheit 451" he disparages condensed books, and though I agree with his premise, "Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more," I've read many a condensed book. A fair sampling is better than utter ignorance.

His anticipation of the sound-byte should be taken to heart, though, since it is so brief it often fails to adequately represent the event or remark.

Regarding minorities, he artfully includes dog lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, and people from Oregon along with other more expected categories. De Tocqueville warned of the tyranny of the minority.

Also, ren, how long are you planning to leave this thread open? I hope to read and offer more thoughts.

Quote:

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ren, how long are you planning to leave this thread open? I hope to read and offer more thoughts

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Usually when a discussion starts to drift off and we find posts seem repetitive, that will be the time to ask for a consensus of opinion whether to close it. I certainly wouldn't while people still have fresh ideas, and it is still interesting and lively.
Secret: I have not finished it yet myself! The library took time to save it for me, and I have other things to read that to me are vital, eg Eric Clapton's autobiography which I cannot put down for long, he is god after all. That is why you haven't heard much from me about Fahrenheit451.

I am SO thankful you posted that, Ren! I had to order the book from my State Library system as it was no longer on the shelves at my local library. I just picked the book up a day ago and have only had a chance to read a few pages. Lot's going on in my personal life which is interfering with "reading time". Hopefully I will have it done fairly soon. I was one of those that said I wanted the book discusion back and now I haven't been able to contribute. I WISH I could say it was due to a distraction by Eric Clapton and not a divorce and ill brother. As it's said, "That's life." Sandy

Hey, I'm nuts about Eric Clapton myself. Do finish that book, ren, and we've got plenty of time here, jordan.

Hmm, Schaeffer and Duncan. The former might be a bit of a problem.

I also believe that Clarisse represents exactly what is NOT pure and innocent, an attraction to the complicated, the difficult, the ideas and ideologies that Montag's world has attempted to erase. He is attracted to her precisely because she raises disturbing questions.

Those who love to read and discuss are not pure and innocent. They are, like Clarisse, the rabble-rousers.

This idea about Clarisse dumbfounds me. The way I read it, Montag is trapped in an evil society, a dystopia. Clarisse is a rescuing angel, or if you prefer, a nagging doubt regarding the status quo. No Siren she, but a fresh breath.

In the two pages just before we first meet her, we find, "...as if a wind had sprung up from nowhere, as if someone had called his name....The air seemed charged with a special calm....His inner mind...had heard the faintest whisper. Breathing?....The autumn leaves blew...letting the motion of the wind...carry her....Her dress whispered...the white stir of her face....The trees overhead made a great sound of letting down their dry rain."

By her own example Clarisse suggests a life in a totally different realm, one where people aren't afraid to question, think, and learn, where fear and cacophony cease, where men trust one another and share their brotherhood. With supreme effort, Montag attains that realm. But Clarisse is not there. She was dead by then. But! Glorious BUT! "And he was surprised to learn how certain he suddenly was of a single fact he could not prove. Once, long ago, Clarisse had walked here, where he was walking now." Theirs was never a passionate union, neither a joyful reunion, but a separate walking of the same paths.

I'll replace "innocent" with "knowledgeable" or "experienced." Pure, as in distilled; good, as in wholesome; experienced, as in real-in-the-flesh, not theoretical or chimerical. Surely Bradbury intends that we conclude Montag is freer and happier at the end of the story than at the beginning.

Any thoughts on this out there?

Jordandog, I'm sorry for your difficulties and look forward to your remarks.

Sorry , I am still reading. That was a very thoughtful post, queproblema and one that made me admire again, the beautiful, dreamy language of this book.

One final take here. I'd hoped for more back-and-forth discussion.

One of my cardinal rules in trying to understand a book is to know the author. It's rarely possible to actually know the author, but an inquisitive reader can usually find out quite a bit about him or her. Ray Bradbury, as it turns out, was raised in the Baptist tradition, and in Fahrenheit 451 sets the Bible at the heart of Western civilization. Perhaps this symbolism is merely a writer’s ploy to make his story resonate with mid-20th century minds, but then why do we find Montag baptized into death and resurrected? Why is one born of the black-visaged fireman stock transformed into one of the intellectual hoboes to whom are committed the oracles of God....and of man?

No, Bradbury is no evangelical; he reaches back to paganism for his more telling symbol of rebirth, the phoenix. Bradbury is a humanist of the Unitarian-Universalist variety. He wants to preserve the writings of Byron, Paine, Machiavelli, and Christ. Yet he ends his tale with a verse from the last chapter of the New Testament, hinting of the heavenly Jerusalem!

Granted, I see the world through Christian lenses, but how could one fail to see the religious angle here, even on a quick read? Initially, when the firemen burn an old woman in her house with her books, Bradbury draws our attention to Christian martyrdom with the parallel of Latimer’s and Ridley’s deaths at the stake. That this was internecine persecution under Bloody Mary, Roman Catholicism v. Protestantism, underscores that the conflict in this story is man against man. Faber warns of the futility of trying to save mankind from itself: “Reminding the survivors that man has his good side, too? They will only gather up their stones to hurl at each other.”

Montag prizes what might be the only extant Bible in the country and then openly reads it on the subway. Here Bradbury juxtaposes the banality of a "Denham's Dentrifice" ad with the timelessness of Scripture, all the while his prose echoing the noise and rhythm of the radio and train...and Montag's own wild thoughts. The only person on the subway who is approaching rational thought appears insane, and indeed he is madly grappling with reality.

Later, in Bradbury’s eclectic “new earth,” Gandhi, Buddha, and Confucius hobnob with Jefferson, Lincoln, and the four Evangelists. And there the converted fireman is received into the fellowship of the elite whose brains are repositories of the wisdom of the ages--living books, “with their pages uncut, for the customers who might come by in later years, some with clean and some with dirty fingers.”

Anyone else to contribute here, or shall I close the thread?

OK I will close it, but if anyone is desperate to post more, send me a PM